Hall of Fame
In Nirvana, there is a curious skyscraper, a hodge-podge of styles and wild invention. It’s like a fanciful layer cake built large. Upon a hand-troweled foundation lay several stories of sturdy walls adorned irregularly with polished gems. Above, the rules of architecture were flaunted more than honored. One floor shriveled to half its base, while others had strange beams striking out at odd angles. Thereafter, layers of intricate workmanship gave way to glistening walls of reflective surfaces. High above, barely visible through the ethereal atmosphere, lay peculiar stories which looped onto one another, all capped by an austere functional tower topping the Hall of Fame.
Its basement was rough and approximate. The methodical wedges of Babylonian cuneiform covered the lower wall, while colorful Egyptian hieroglyphics decorated the upper portion.
The first floor, laid out with rigorous precision by Euclid and Eratosthenes, covered precisely one square block of celestial real estate. Its residents appreciated the entering light of the sunrooms. Archimedes surprised everyone with his temper whenever his light was blocked. The library floor, contributed by Diophantus with lighting by Diogenes, is replete with 700,000 manuscripts not seen on Earth since 638 A.D.
On the wings of several middle floors, spires and minarets capped the rooms of al-Khwarizmi and his clan. The null room was striking, with no bench for contemplation.
But our aim here is not to detail the lower stories, but to bring your attention to the squabbling going on in the most recent construction.
Einstein rests on the penthouse’s veranda, comfortable in his gedanken chair. Only one thing disturbs the great man at this moment—a spike piercing through the side wall from the rambunctious rooms of upstart physicists.
In their temerity, they claimed the big bang started the universe.
Einstein shook his shoulders and pulled his wiry hair. His gedanken was ge-uneasy. Hadn’t he clarified that there was no preferred coordinate system in the universe?
Using the psychic phone, Einstein dialed a room several floors below his lounge chair. Resting after a long, busy life, he closed his eyes and gently stroked his eyelids, waiting for a reply from the inventor of the clockwork universe.
After a determinate wait, his call was picked up. “Hello Isaac, help a new friend. How did you recover—when you learned that absolute time and place were lost?”
Einstein listened for a relative minute. “You never believed it! What?” The words streamed out of the wire-haired scientist. “Why do I care now? Because the universe’s origin has been found once again, in the Big Bang!”
Image: Tower of Babel. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Public domain wikicommons
